We noted in earlier chapters that the Twelve, beginning in Joseph Smith's day, were sustained as prophets, seers, and revelators, and that the Quorum of the Twelve were sustained as the First Presidency of the Church following the death of Brigham Young.

Alvin Toffler or George Gilder might have been more likely choices for back-page revelators, but Negroponte ponied up $75,000 in seed money when the Old Media barons were showing Wired founders Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe the door.

A Revelator song notable for its classic uses of balance and incremental repetition, for its fusion of New Testament apocalyptic images, its folk diction and syntax fitted out as pulpit rhetoric and prophecy, and its sensitivity to simultaneously occurring dimensions of time and space.

The vision of the speaker, superimposed on the apocalyptic vision of John the Revelator, includes all time and eternity: the remote past during which the Revelator, from exile on Patmos, wrote his letters to the seven churches; the immediate past of the dead mother who now dwells on the island with the prophet; the present of the "leader" or preacher who, as head of the church to which the speaker belongs, has received a "letter"—the Book of Revelation itself—from John; the eternal present in which the speaker and the prophet coexist spiritually; and the rapidly approaching future, the last days which John prophesied.